In December 2017, the IAB published its 2.0 Podcast Measurement Technical Guidelines which “attempts to provide clarity in the marketplace by describing best practices for measuring downloads, audience size, and ad delivery.” Podtrac was a significant contributor to this document, and we wanted to assure all podcast publishers and advertisers that Podtrac audience counts are and have always been consistent with the best practices outlined in the IAB Podcast Metrics 2.0 document.

A few publications, including Adweek and Digiday, have recently published articles about publishers claiming to be the first to adopt the guidelines. The articles focus on the use by some publishers of ad impression counts from podcast ad insertion companies.

The articles do not address other important podcast metrics beyond ad insertion numbers, such as unique monthly audience at the podcast, publisher and episode levels. Podtrac has provided publishers access to these metrics for years, and uses unique monthly audience by publisher and podcast to create our monthly Podcast Industry Audience Rankings. The IAB Podcast Metrics 2.0 Guidelines are consistent with Podtrac counts.

Podtrac supports the industry continuing to improve its metrics and the ad insertion companies and their publisher customers that are pushing ahead with implementing the new IAB standards.

Podtrac, the most used podcast audience measurement system, and the audience counts for the thousands of publishers who use it, have always been consistent with the new guidelines. You can find more details here.